AQA (A): Paper 1 Comparative set text
At the heart of The Go-Between, Leo Colston is constantly in motion. Set free from school and from his mother, and granted greater independence by his friend Marcus’s measles, Leo can stroll around the rooms of Brandham Hall, to the outhouses, to Norwich, to Black Farm. Like Mercury, the god of roads and of travellers, the restless go-between roams between places and people throughout the novel. And, crucially, he goes between classes: Leo is the link between the worlds of the aristocratic Lord Trimingham, the middle-class Maudsleys and the tenant farmer Ted Burgess. And as narrator too, Leo goes between eras: he is the 12-year-old of the year 1900 and the ageing narrator of the early 1950s (Hartley began to write The Go-Between in May 1952), viewing his childhood and England from the other side of two world wars and a range of social, political and geopolitical changes that have transformed Britain from an imperial and economic superpower to the indebted and exhausted ‘child of dust’ of the epigraph.
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